Filmmaniak

Who would have said that an animated film about the production of whisky could be touching? This film’s main protagonist is a young journalist who is assigned to write an article about a Japanese female distiller, but he ends up writing a series of articles, in the course of which he expands his own knowledge of whisky and gradually become entangled in the secrets of the family business, which has experienced a number of crises. The characters’ effort to achieve the ideal mix of flavours, the production of which would build on a tradition that had been interrupted years before, is strongly connected with the dynamics of family relationships, responsibility for the company’s good name, a sense of togetherness with the determined employees and personal honour. In addition to that, the neophyte journalist learns to like his own work while finding out that, like him, many people have experienced such a situation and ended up being happy in a job different from the one they had dreamed of. On top of that, the film offers enjoyable animation, likable and well-written characters, and a number of emotionally tender moments.

The only thing worse than finding a spider in your apartment is losing a spider in your apartment. Just such an event in the film results in the infestation of a whole apartment building with venomous fiddlebacks (or whatever they were) from the basement to the attic, where the spiders multiply at a startling rate, each time growing significantly larger than their antecedents, in which case the film flirts a bit with science fiction at the end. The realistic setting of an apartment building in a social housing estate and the fresh, energetic approach of the young filmmaker are exactly what the arachno-horror genre need. After the long exposition with the introduction of the characters, the action gains proper intensity, which it constantly escalates so that some scenes border on being unbearable, especially for people who are repelled by spiders. Absolutely everyone will squirm in their seats. Vermin is the best spider horror movie since Arachnophobia from 1990.

A remarkable yet rather simple satire about fame and its transmutations, renown on social networks, internet celebrity, over-sensitivity in today’s world and cancel culture. Nicolas Cage excels in the role of the ordinary bored professor who suddenly starts to appear in millions of people’s dreams. It’s as if he is a living meme who is capable of being funny, scary, sorrowful and embarrassing. It’s also worth mentioning the entertaining dream sequences and surrealistic atmosphere, though the whole high-concept metaphor is only partly effective, as it doesn’t go very deep and is exceedingly literal.

A drama with horror elements about a Philippine cleaning lady and single mother who manages to find employment and housing in an opulent British household, which on closer inspection hides numerous secrets. The film is a distinctive and stylistically bold social criticism including the motif of immigrants trying to fit into society and themes associated with post-colonialism. Here you will find filmmaking techniques that are typical of horror movies about haunted houses, though these are used as a means of emphasising the real horrors, which are the experiences of immigrants, who regularly encounter prejudices, generalisations and condescending attitudes. Rooted in anger at society’s behaviour toward minorities, Raging Grace is the debut film of a director of Philippine descent who, despite a few stumbles in the narrative, clearly and forcefully formulates his thesis, acknowledges the culture of his ancestors and tells about the living conditions of many people through the authentically portrayed characters of the mother and daughter.

This looks a bit like film-noir shot in the 1960s by Orson Welles according to a screenplay by Fritz Lang,  who played around with the subject of an enigmatic murder at an annual conference of theoretical physicists and twisted it into the form of a mysterious metaphysical sci-fi crime thriller set in the Swiss Alps. Among other things, the movie’s theme is based on the multiverse. Whereas other filmmakers often use the concept of the multiverse to build hectic stories packed with wild ideas, here it is conversely part of a loose, elliptical narrative intended for a more discerning audience. The film itself is a multiverse in terms of its visual and stylistic aspects, as various forms of black-and-white film from different decades come together here thanks to the camerawork and manipulation of light and shadows. However, the interestingly written characters interact with each other in an increasingly less coherent story that is already utterly unclear, especially in the last quarter of the film. Overall, The Theory of Everything is interpretively stimulating, but it also runs up against the limits of the viewer’s willingness to engage in inferring the connections and meaning in the intertwining of the individual storylines.

Expecting an ordinary disaster thriller is basically a mistake. Twenty seconds of digital destruction and a few shots of building rubble serve only as an inducement to tell an allegory about the collapse of society and morality as a result of an unforeseen crisis during which people begin to show themselves as selfish, hypocritical and callous monsters. In order for this allegory to work, however, the screenplay makes a mockery of everything else. The idea that one apartment remains entirely unscathed after a terrifying earthquake flattens the whole city of Seoul is absurd. The issue of millions of dead is not addressed in any way, no one deals with the loss of friends and relatives, and the situation in the rest of Korea (let alone the rest of world) is not even mentioned. The story is focused solely on what happens in the building, where a class system immediately emerges when the survivors are divided into apartment owners and those who lost their homes, the rabble condemned to freeze to death in the brutal cold on the broken streets. All possible ills of social inequality are crammed into the story together with criticism of capitalism (for example, a leader is chosen from among the residents, leading within seconds to the creation of a corrupt environment of bribery). An absolute oddity is the passage in which the apartment owners ruthlessly expel everyone else from the building, essentially sending them to their deaths, and then organise for themselves an outdoor party with karaoke and a feast made of supplies that they stole from the ruins of a nearby store, whose owner they had killed. It’s possible to sympathise only with one woman who is the only resident to give any consideration to ethics, so it’s a good thing that the film approaches a large part of the story and most of the subplots from her perspective. Otherwise, it would be a hell of a manipulative construct.

A Muslim woman’s struggle against patriarchal laws and her greedy brother-in-law, who could take her apartment away from her after the death of her father and husband, is coincidentally also the subject of this year’s Jordanian co-production drama Inshallah a Boy, which handled the same theme better. Here the main protagonist is the daughter of the woman in question. She is an adolescent medical-school candidate who is consumed with feelings of guilt over the death of her boyfriend. Thanks to that, this social drama about the shared hardships of a mother and her daughter is unconventionally enhanced with horror-like visions that appear to both women. However, these visions ultimately don’t lead to anything, are not in any way scary and, as a result, come across as rather needless. The film also isn’t helped by its characters’ odd behaviour or the strange climax with a nonsensical outcome that doesn’t make any kind of point.

Poor Things is Yorgos Lanthimos’s most extravagant film yet, and that’s saying a lot. One of the most distinctive contemporary filmmakers properly broke free of his chains and, furthermore, had a lot of money to bring his far-out visions to life. The result is a complex, impertinently entertaining and bountifully bizarre comedy with a Frankenstein motive about one woman’s emancipatory journey to get to know the world and herself. A woman with the body of an adult and the mind of her own unborn child, whom we follow through a narrative arranged in chapters during her travels around Europe, as she breaks every conceivable social convention, gradually tripping up the patriarchy and finally putting a knife in its back as she undergoes complete accelerated development from a curious toddler to a naïve adolescent to an eloquent intellectual with her own clear opinion on the state of things. With its intelligent dialogue, well-thought-out concept, topical subject, intoxicating visuals, gripping acting performances, devilishly morbid ideas and a lot of nudity, Poor Things is like a fine wine. Oscar nominations are inevitable.

It was said that The Wind Rises would most likely be Miyazaki’s last film, but that turned out not to be the case. And The Boy and the Heron will not necessarily be the final chapter of his career either, though it is possible to see from it a bit of creative repetition as he looks back to his own work and passes the torch to the younger generation in the end, which is also presented in the story. In any case, the master of animation and film narrative has not eased up in terms of the number of ideas, the diversity of his visions and the depth of the ideas presented; his film looks beautiful and overflows with the magical, dreamlike, fairy-tale elements that can be alternately cruel and tender. The introduction of the film is uncomplicated and practically devoid of the supernatural, but as soon as the titular heron smiles and begins speaking with a human voice and the main (unfortunately not very interesting) protagonist falls into the fantasy world, in which he must come to terms with the loss of his mother and with feelings of pain, loneliness, anger and sadness, Miyazaki’s powers of imagination and playfulness kick into high gear. However, the effort to say as much as possible in the space of two hours leads to the fact that the film is very dense in places and doesn’t let some of the scenes fade out properly. At the same time, Miyazaki returns to his tried-and-try story formulas (he most noticeably draws from his own Spirited Away) and frequently used trademarks. The Boy and the Heron is practically a catalogue of everything that can be associated with Miyazaki’s films, but it doesn’t reach the level of his best works.

No words, and yet so much emotion. The friendship between a dog and a robot in 1980s New York has only just begun when the two protagonists are separated from each other (due to consumer negligence and underestimation of the effects of corrosion) and the film tells their stories separately. However, each of them has the same dreams about the other, from which the film gets its title. After the initial joy, the plot takes a quite sad turn, so the prevailing feeling from the film is rather melancholy, which is reversed in the end, though that does not entirely involve a fairy-tale happy ending. Though the animation is simple, it contains a very large number of endearing and funny details and works very effectively with the characters’ facial expressions and body language. The film will also be appreciated by adults (perhaps even more than children) who have life experience and are aware that true friendship requires a joint effort and is a commitment to looking after one another. Robot Dreams is deeper and emotionally more complex than it may appear at first glance.